Lost in the Middle Quotes

“the struggle of midlife is fundamentally rooted in the idolatries of the heart.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Remember the biblical principle of idolatry, desire for a good thing becomes a bad thing when that desire becomes a ruling thing.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Midlife doesn’t introduce you to a new you; it forces you to admit who you have been all along.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“When you have one eye on eternity, this present physical world looks entirely different.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: Midlife and the Grace of God

“It is tempting to forget that there is an eternity or to think that it doesn’t make any difference in the present. Paul says just the opposite to the Corinthians; that if you only have Christ in this life, you are a person to be pitied. Eternity is the only thing that can give you a reason to continue.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Sinners tend to move away from defining themselves in relationship to their Creator and begin defining themselves in relationship to the creation.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“You are eternally loved by God; you are eternally his son or daughter; what he wants for you is always right and best; and what he has planned for you is immeasurably better than anything you could have dreamed for yourself.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Rest will only be found as you are willing to believe that there is Someone who is controlling the details of your life, not only for his glory, but also for your good.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“God’s purpose in controlling the details of your life (the exact length of it and the locations where you live) is so that at any moment in the middle of your unfolding story, you can reach out and touch him, because his rule makes him very near to every one of us. What each of us really needs in our finite and faltering humanness is not so much the success of our plans, but God himself.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Yet this grand and glorious God, for the purpose of redemption, becomes a man. The untraversable line between Creator and creature is crossed. The Word becomes flesh. The feet of God touch earth! The voice of God is heard on earth! The Lord comes as the Second Adam, the Word of Life, the Final Priest, and the Sacrificial Lamb. He satisfies God’s requirements, he atones for God’s anger, and he defeats death.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“It was never meant to be this way. All other dreams were meant to be subservient to God’s dream. Yet in the pursuit of my “essential” dream, I have been slowly building my own personal tower to my own personal heaven. It has me. It defines me. It motivates me. It guides and directs me. It gives me a reason to get up in the morning and a reason to press on. Every day I get out my mortar and trowel and put another few courses of bricks on my personal tower to the sky. I’m still going to church, and I haven’t forsaken the faith, but in a profound and practical way, God is out of the picture. I am not in a place of overt rebellion to him, yet I am not serving him. I don’t have time for the Lord because all of my daily time and energy is invested in my dream. I was given the capacity to imagine so that everyday my “eyes” would be filled with him, yet now another dream”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“The world we live in is a house of pain, and we cannot live in it without it touching us. You will never be smart enough to escape its grasp. From the violence of childbirth to cut fingers and scraped knees, from sibling mockery and peer rejection to familial brokenness, suffering is part of every phase of human existence. We enter life through suffering’s door and we exit life through suffering’s door.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“The highest paid members of our society are not the people who teach us, heal us, or lead us in worship; the people we are willing to award with inordinate sums of money are the people who entertain us.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“The grief of midlife is not simply that we all collect things to regret, that we all fear getting old, or that we all mourn the demise of our dreams. We mourn the fact that midlife exposes our idols’ fundamental inability to deliver.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“One of the most dangerous delusions for each of us is the delusion of our own sovereignty. And one of our most dangerous idols is the idol of control.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Suffering is an evil that an all-wise, all-righteous, and all-loving God uses for eternal good.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“That one special thing that you always wanted to accomplish never gets done because you lived each day under the tyranny of the urgent.”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“I just need enough to tide me over until I need more. —Bill Hoest”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God

“Our affluence does not make us selfish; it simply enables us to afford more sophisticated expressions of selfishness. ”
― Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle: MidLife and the Grace of God